Six minutes into Edgar Wright's latest film, I could think of only one thing to say.
Woohoo!
Making tongue-in-cheek cinema is a tricky thing. Even our most seasoned entertainers have stumbled occasionally in trying too hard to keep things zingy. Not so for Wright who seems to be spectacularly sure of every touch, even the most obvious one. It was expected that 'Baby Driver', being about a fiendishly smart getaway driver, should begin by a turbo-charged opening heist that introduces right away the vehicular artistry of its intriguingly unconventional hero. That it does, for sure, but watch just how it does and then tell me if you are not amazed.
Our hero is Baby (and yes that is not a nickname, unlike the other thieves who dress up more suavely than they actually are) and you can forget that he is only a boy on the verge of 20 with a face that looks like as sweet as soft, doughy marshmallow. He stares back at us behind those boyish glasses with intense concentration and you might think that he is all set to rock and roll like the others in the gang. Think again, for while their revelry is predictable, his riff is something else completely.
One absolute classic in The Doors' catalog would be that one in which Jim Morrison screamed out that 'music is your only friend'. That is a fact that holds true for those, who do not just listen to songs to pass the time or kill boredom. These are loveable freaks, freaks like me, who love their choice of music. Yes, love is the operative word here; if you have ever paused in the middle of a Rajesh Khanna song to admire about how wonderful does Kishore Kumar sound, or a Jatin-Lalit chartbuster to feel those mandolins ringing in your ear or even the weakest Pink Floyd song to admire that David Gilmour solo, you will end up loving Baby himself.
For this is a hero (and yes, he is a darn good one at that) who, when waiting alone for the job to be done with, drops his guard and starts lip-syncing the songs bursting out more than audibly from his in-ear headphones. Pedestrians and cars pass by on this otherwise ordinary Atlanta morning but Baby, who should be keeping a finger on his car keys to get started, is having a bit of a private party, drumming his hands on his steering wheel and bopping his head and the wipers in perfect unison to the beats of his song. And when the chase begins, do not expect him to even think of pressing the pause button. If Baby knows his driving, he even knows what music would be best with it. Despite what others might say, he believes in the importance of a score for a score.
So does Wright, actually. The songs, fascinatingly, leap out from his eclectic I-Pod ensemble and come alive as the soundtrack of the whole film, which is incredible, asking us to join in the fun that Baby is having all the while. Sure, it turns even appropriately melancholic, romantic and even disillusioned and desperate by turns, mirroring just what this hero goes through. And yet, it is always smashing to listen; it is impossible to stop tapping your feet and, for today's generation who may equate Baby with merely a mediocre Justin Bieber song, the whole soundtrack or even the film might double as something of an encyclopaedia urging you to discover those classics.
Yet, there is so much else in Baby Driver, both the boy and the film, to make us love them both. To come to the boy, we cannot help but admire just how well he breaks the image of our mean machine wielding men of the silver screen. We have admired both laconic studs behind breakneck wheels like Max Rockatansky or any of the anonymous motor cowboys played by Ryan O' Neal and Ryan Gosling as well as debonairs who choose to drive cars with a lot of personality to them, like Batman or James Bond. But while all those men were, at one level, hammering hard their machismo to the tune of music produced by others for them, Baby is refreshingly comfortable in his boyish coolth and unabashedly personal celebration of music. That reason for drowning out tinnitus might be just a ruse to disguise the fact that music is both his fuel and his weakness, his voice and his beating heart.
Tough guys call him 'as loony as his tunes' (as one puts it, 'he is either hard as nails or shit-scared'); the leggy and lascivious bimbette cannot help but smile in wonder and the meeker colleagues are simply bemused. And his boss Doc, played by smarmy sophistication by the infallible Kevin Spacey, cannot help but be awe-struck by his gifts (that is when he is not boasting about himself). But Wright loves Baby and lavishes this affection throughout the narrative, filling in lovely and beautifully quirky details into just what this pubescent wunderkind is up to when not waiting behind the wheels for his songs to explode. This is a kid who stays up at night remixing tracks using recorded snippets of stray bits of conversation and his own snazzy bits and touches. The IPods are a different tale altogether for Baby also enjoys stocking audio-cassettes of his zingy remixes. So, there is no room for product placement here.
I could not help but fall in love with the way Baby discovers his soulmate in a literal sense. Other directors would have cast either just a celebrity face or just a stock character who would become eventually secondary to the motives of the hero but the director instead chooses not the glittering blonde girl whom Baby has noticed before but rather Deborah, played by the evocative and exceptional Lily James, who impresses Baby first with her effortless effervescence and then, most winningly, by crooning casually a song that spells out, lovingly, his name itself. Wow.
As a particularly cynical fellow thief predicts in the beginning, Baby will soon have to get his hands dirty and this he does inevitably, discovering that pulling off a job is not just about terrific timing or those adrenaline-pumping getaway chases or even the music. It also involves a body count, especially when the robbers in question turn out to be such slimy and sleazy low-lifes as the ones that Doc hires.
That gives me the opportunity to talk about just how good that supporting cast is. Jamie Foxx is phenomenal as the fiery and furious Bats, Jon Hamm is endearingly weary as a slickly groomed Buddy and Eiza Gonzalez is smoking hot as the ravishing Darling. And they are all upstaged by Spacey's gift of gab, wondering at one point why would Baby prefer to work for a pizzeria named 'Goodfellas' when he can work for a 'Great Fella' like himself.
The fact that it takes the name of the greatest gangster film of all time, as well as a surname from one of that film's characters, is no accident, though. 'Baby Driver' comes darn spectacularly close to something that Martin Scorsese could have made. And it is not just because of the audaciously brilliant sense of music or even that jaw-dropping endless take in the opening credits (in which Baby is waltzing to his own personal score and even pausing in front of a musical instruments gallery to mimic a trumpet solo). It is also about how Wright chooses to zoom into the tiniest bits of detail, cutting from clothes being tossed and turned in a front-load washing machine to a revolving vinyl record, from Baby's fingers trying to imitate the beauty of a keyboard or violin to the fact that Deborah wears a uniform with a badge that says Jonathan. Even those extraordinary and enthralling action scenes are detailed in the unhinged way in which they explode. We have seen too many car chases in too many movies but 'Baby Driver' shows us, for the first time, the tricks and technique that make those tight swerves and turns happen. And even as a shootout in the daylight has shades of Michael Mann, the brilliance lies in how Wright lets chaos reign. Take a bow, cinematographer Bill Pope for this.
In movies and music, the biggest and best surprises have come from America's friends across the Atlantic. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones taught us how to rock and roll in style, Alfred Hitchcock invented the very stuff that our thrillers are made of, Charles Chaplin taught us to have both a laugh and shed a tear and among the newbies, Christopher Nolan has shown that our all-American superheroes are capable of being both brooding and inspiring at the same time. Wright, being one of such stellar British talents, has done something similar, his brilliant trilogy of genre comedies poking acidic fun at the silliness of Hollywood's tropes. But while there is firecracker dialogue to offer self-depreciatory hilarity, from robbers confusing Michael Myers and Mike Myers to an arms dealer describing his merchandise as prime pieces of pork, it is nevertheless a film that invests real emotional stakes to make it even serious and dramatic. This is also a film that shows its criminals not as merely evil caricatures but also capable of unexpected warmth and insight. Buddy enjoys a Queen classic with Baby while, moments later, Bats explains as to why he cannot trust a getaway driver who is too much in love with music.
But we are already in love with him anyway.
Ansel Elgort is unforgettable as Baby, playing this brilliant lad with such a winsome balance of an intriguing enigma and boyish pluck that makes him so wonderfully relatable to us all. The way he swoons and sways, when falling inevitably in love, is just as charming as the way he can lip-read Doc's instructions or even get away from a bloody mess without losing his cool.This is the kind of performance that makes us see a young actor in a whole new light and while hitherto he was known only as a sugary-sweet loverboy, we are now going to call him Baby, not for his looks, but for being so cool that there are so many songs about him already. We need Baby to remind us that heroics are not just for the muscled and masculine studs; it is high time since we got a boy hero who is more than just a wizard or a Hobbit and who is not afraid to get roaring and romantic, given that you pick the right song for him.
So, let's play what David Bowie sung once. 'Shake it, shake it, Baby.'
My Rating: 5 Stars Out Of 5
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